NewsGroups: alt.jokes, alt.comics.dilbert From: Simon Laub Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 Subject: The Weasel Zone - Give the Nobel Prize to Scott Adams! The Weasel zone : -------------------- December 23rd. 2002. ------------------------ ============================ Scott Adams' "Dilbert and the way of the Weasel" is a terrific book about the Weasel zone. The Weasel Zone: Is a gigantic area between good moral behaviour and outright felonious activities. Scott Adams calls it the weasel zone. --------- The weasel zone is not surprisingly filled with weasels. People who spend their day avoiding work, trying to appear better than their co-workers, hiding incompetence etc. One way of doing so is: Ignorance: Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. But when it comes to your job, ignorance is an excellent excuse, because it is so belivable. Between the fact that your boss never tells you important things and the fact that you never read any email that is marked "urgent", no one expects you to know anything. It is a miracle that you can find your cubicle. Use that reputation to your advantage. Another technique that a weasel must master is "Matrix management". When you work for a big company, the only way to succeed is by begging dozens of people to do the one thing that they hate above all else, i.e. their jobs. This system of begging for help and being ignored is called matrix management. Matrix management involves hunting down co-workers, who don't answer their phone and don't return emails. Good MM helps the weasel avoid actual work. Not even coffee breaks are free from the world of weasels: Coffee weasels! Taking the last cup of coffee is a difficult weasel maneuver to pull off. The hard part is getting out of the room undetected. Ideally, your office will have uncarpeted floors so you can hear footsteps approaching. Listen for a few seconds, and if its quiet, you can safely make a clean getaway. But if your work area is carpeted, and people can sneak up on you, it is good to have a back up weasel maneuver. If anyone is coming then make a big deal about tossing the grounds away, while you are announcing, "that you are making a new pot of coffee, again!". You might even mention how much you hate people, who take the last cup and don't make a new pot. Obviosuly: - To avoid such scenarios - The workplace should install instant coffee machines! - Then you might be able to camouflage that the workplace is weasel infested.... ---- In order to stay alive weasels needs customers: Customers: At the end of your project, you'll need customers who are too dumb to know what they are buying. Realistically speaking all new products are hideously flawed. So, in the beginning you need customers who - Against all reason - don't seem to mind paying for defective products. Non-full disclosure: You don't lie to your customers. You call it "non-full" disclosure. The customers want something back though! So you can improvise a customer tour. Customer tours. Most activities have an obvious purpose. A blazing exception to that rule is the "customer tour" of an office. It is not clear why weasels insists that you look at their office space. Weasels generally insists on giving one hour guided museum tours of the office space. Weasel: "On you left we have a bunch of cubicles...." somwhow the weasel thinks this beats working on the thing the customer is supposed to buy. Sometimes it all gets too much for the weasel: Sick days = vacation days for weasels: Offer me a company that offers paid time off for sickness and I'll show you a company that is bristling with sick weasels. (After a weasel vacation) Back at the cubicle farm again, the weasel will start all over with the powerpoint slides. Weasel knowledge. If you take a bunch of ignorance and mix together with powerpoint charts, you get weasel knowledge. Weasel knowledge is to actual knowledge what a painting of a diamond is to the actual diamond. ----- A weasel infested workplace will soon have weasel management with multilevel marketing plans: One way to determine whether your company has become a cult is to look for "value statements" - a value statement describes how employees are expected to act - and includes things like honesty, trust and teamwork. It begins to appear when management realize that the workplace is weasel infested. Another sure sign to look for is multilevel marketing plans. Weasal management will pretend it is down on the floor with you. I.e. If you are a stinking rich executive your employees might resent you. You will need to pretend to be a little person to reduce the hatred. One popular way is to move out of your big office and into a cubicle. It sends the message: "If I can work here, so can you." Still, the manager still decides everything. Weasel trap: If you are a weasel manager and have no idea what your weasel employees are doing, you ask them what they are good at, and then twist it around so it sounds bad: E.g. If you are accurate, then you are too much of a perfectionist. If you see the big picture, then you don't have attention to details. If you don't ask inane questions during meetings, you are not participating. In order to counter weasel management, the weasel employee must know that the following things look good: Good things to be doing: - See the picture. - Get on the same page. - Touch base. - Get more bang for your money. - Make a no-brainer decision. - Keep ahead of the game. - Do a sanity check. - Get back to basics. - Reach out. - See whats coming. - Stretch the envelope. - Sing from the same hymn sheet. - Drill down into the data. Your weasel talk should be filled with such remarks. Things you don't want do to, and that they are doing in the other departments (the reason why things are going bad): - Reinvent the wheel. - Raise a red flag. - Miss the window of opportunity. - Jump on a granade. - Have feature creep. - Get lost in the noise. In you want to jump ahead of your fellow weasels you must try to juice up your speak with weasel words: Business weasel words: - Core competencies. - Cost effective. - Cost reduction. - Change agent. - Change management. - Benchmark. - B2B. - Lessons learned. - Empower. - Fast track. - Flow charts. - Goal-directed. - Key performance indicator. - Product spokesperson. - Risk management. - Synergies. - Technology platforms. - Win-win. - World class. Eventually you might master Weaseleze: Weaseleze: Weaseleze is the official tongue of weasels. It is composed of words that make sense individually, but when arranged in weazel sentences, they become misleading or impenetrable. People who have important jobs don't need important titles. For example if a surgeon wanted to put on his business card "almighty giver of life" or likewise, people would think he was a quack. On the other hand, if you are powerless cubicle worker, then you need an inflated title - so your untitled fellow weasels can't say no to you. You must demand impressing titles. If nothing works for you then try out for a job at the safety committee. Safety weasels. Sometimes large companies have safety committees. Where weasel employess get to spend time drinking coffee. Safety is a great weasel word, because it has plenty of wiggle room. Almost anything can kill you. So there will be plenty to talk about on the committee - and you boss, cant critizise your lousy job performance, bacause you are doing this great thing for your co-workers. Back at your cubicle there is always room for improvement on your weasel ways: Tech genious: In order to be perceived as a genious in the tech industry, you must: a) Be arrogant. Nothing makes you look smarter than dismissing other peoples ideas with utter disdain. b) Refuse to document anything. This guarentees that people will always have to beg you for information. c) Be opinionated. Don't explain anything - just make a reference to the fact that you have seen this problem a million times before, and you have a workable solution - no reason to inventing the wheel once again? d) Resist using any process. Processes are for losers. If unavoidable then use crash test dummies. E.g. put two people who honestly hate each other to work together on e.g. "extreme programming" and see them perish. Will be fun. And when failure comes you tell upper management that it was unavoidable. And finger some of your opponents in the process. Weasel tactics. The goal of every political campaign is to discourage voter turnout to the point where the candidate with the largest family wins. This is also know as the Kennedy strategy. It can also work for you in the weasel environment. Whenever there is strife and argument - Be sure to belong to the most populus group. And if that doesn't hold any power then side with the winning side. Don't mind the issues. Or minor things like facts. Be a weasel. Aarhus, Denmark. Mon, Dec 23rd 2002 Simon Laub Email: sil@ccieurope.com ----- This review was based on a copy of the book that came with express delivery (Willem) directly from Schiphol Airport immidiately after publication. http://www.simonlaub.net/Fortunecity/Amsterdam/amsterdam.htm